In recent years companies have sought to implement a more flexible and distributed information technology infrastructure that would allow them to adapt better to a rapidly changing business environment and to align their business processes and underlying applications more effectively with their evolving business goals. Still, while striving to adopt new IT architecture, companies hope to retain as much as possible of their previous IT investments. Thus, computer software reuse has become a major strategic goal of many companies.
One increasingly popular IT architecture is known as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). One common approach for implementing SOA is by defining a target service architecture model, also called a “to-be” business model, in which the business processes and services that a company wishes to implement are described. Unfortunately, as a top-down approach, to-be modeling does not consider existing IT assets. In a different approach, an existing system is converted into SOA without regard to a business model. However, this “bottom-up” approach is not suited to companies that are moving to SOA in order to maximize their flexibility to rapidly adapt their IT to changing business needs.